Good evening you are listening in Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host Rob Zakney.

Tonight, I am joined once again after a long absence by our elite, irregular panelist, Dr. Bruce Garrick.

Hello, gamers.

So, Bruce, you brought us something a little different today.

I think this is probably going to be for a winter of war gaming that we're going to be putting together.

That's still in the planning stages. But this episode's been in the can for quite a bit.

We just didn't have a chance to put the final editing pass on it for a while. But this is an interview you did with Lou Cotney.

And I think certainly when you brought this to my door, and I think a lot of listeners

would be in the same boat, the first question is, well, who's Lou Coteney? What's his body

of work? And so I thought maybe we could set this conversation up a bit and you could contextualize

Lou and Lou and Lou's work for us here.

Yeah. Well, I think Lou is one of the real old school gamers who kind of epitomizes the kind of

DIY ethic that existed in war gaming a long time ago, where the games that were coming out

weren't really the games that people, I mean, they weren't the were coming out weren't really the games that people,

I mean, they weren't the games, they weren't in the form that people wanted.

There were, you know, rough edges and things that didn't work and they didn't like,

and so people just decided they'd fix them, and they just changed them around and changed rules and had new rules.

And Lou was at the forefront of this for a game called Stalingrad, which I think was published

first in 1963, and it was an interesting game, but it had really nothing to do.

It was about the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Germans, and it went from 1941 to 43 and really had no

historical connection to the campaign at all.

I mean, it didn't play in the sense that we think of historical war games these days.

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